"We will be working hard to keep services running and getting people where they need to be"

14th June 2013

Dear Colleagues,

As you may be aware, the G8 Conference will take place in Enniskillen next week and a number of events have been planned leading up to and including the days of the conference. We have been preparing for the impact of this event on our services for some time and while we expect some disruption, we will be working hard to keep services operating and get people where they need to go. We will be keeping our passengers up to date via Twitter, our website and the Contact Centre about any disruption to services.

We are advising our customers that Metro services operating in the area around Belfast City Hall will use alternative departure points and routes throughout the city from 10am on Saturday June 15th; we expect services to return to normal at around 2.30pm. The DRD has advised that people planning to travel into Belfast City Centre on Monday should leave additional time and use public transport to avoid being caught in major traffic congestion. We have arranged extra capacity on buses and trains to cope with any additional demand and the availability of bus lanes means that such services are likely to face fewer delays than general traffic. We will be working hard to keep services running and getting people where they need to be.

This week Translink announced the overall winners of the 2012/2013 Translink Eco-Schools Travel Challenge. St Colman's College, Newry, Victoria College, South Belfast, St Malachy's PS, Newry, and St Vincent de Paul PS, North Belfast all demonstrated the best use of sustainable transport over a four week period. The Translink Eco-Schools Travel Challenge encourages pupils, parents and teachers to use sustainable forms of transport for the school journey and aims to raise awareness on the impact of transport on the environment. Participating schools monitored individual pupil travel patterns for the school journey and encouraged more walking, cycling, bus and train journeys.

Finally, this week we announced a 12% increase in passengers choosing to travel to Dublin on our Enterprise service over the past 12 months compared to the previous year. This is a great result and shows that more and more people are moving to rail as the most relaxing and hassle free way to travel to Dublin whether for work or pleasure. In particular, our online Enterprise web fares starting from just £10 are extremely popular, up over 15% this year alone, as more and more people take advantage of the convenience of buying online.